Pablo Picasso

To be further developed as I finish Assignments 3, 4 and 5.

Picasso’s work is a key influence in my printmaking, both stylistically and conceptually. I am particularly interested in his abstract work both that influenced by African art with its ferocious angularity that is also echoed in Guernica, and the fragmented light of the abstraction in analytic cubism ‘trying to communicate the perfume’ of an image. See particularly:

Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.(p11)

Painting is stronger than I am. It makes me do what it wants. (p70)

A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. (p12)

Linocuts

Invention of the reduction linocut

His earliest linocut is from 1939, but his major period of working in this medium was from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. During this time the artist resided mainly in the south of France, far removed from his collaborative involvement with the master printers in Paris where he had made his etchings and lithographs in the 1930s and 40s. He began by producing linocut posters for ceramic exhibitions and bullfighting events in Vallauris with the talented local printer Hidalgo Arnéra.

Within a very short time Picasso was finding new ways of producing colour linocuts which dispensed with the orthodox method of cutting a separate block of linoleum for each colour. He devised a method of progressively cutting and printing from a single block that required him to foresee the final result, as once he had gouged away the linoleum surface he could not go back.

Still Life under the Lamp (1962)depicts a still life of apples next to a glass goblet, brightly illuminated under a lampshade at night. The BM exhibition shows nine stages, beginning with a blank tabula rasa, Picasso progressively cut and printed the single block, gradually building the image with increasing complexity. At each stage the viewer sees an image that would appear finished but Picasso goes further, pursuing it to its final form. (See Google images)

Jacqueline Reading (1962) a series consisting offour progressive proofs for a monochrome subject, Jacqueline Reading, Picasso’s second wife Jacqueline Roque with whom he lived in the last years of his life. She is posed reading, one hand held to her face and eyes cast down, locked in an interior world. For this print Picasso used two blocks. In the first block he scratched the surface with a stiff comb to describe the form of Jacqueline’s head and bust in tonal terms. A second block was cut with gouges to leave just her outline. Then the print from the second block was superimposed over the first to achieve the final image. (See Google images)